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Graduates 2009: Rob Matthews

Rob Matthews has ideas to spare. Enthusiastic, excited, bright, witty and a little bit exhausting. He’s just graduated from Brighton’s Graphic Design course and the world is his oyster. A chap who likes to question things and will always endeavor to make sure his work has a strong idea behind it. He’s now looking to save up to go gain some experience in the Big Apple and it seems as though when he has his sights set on something, he more often than not achieves it. Watch out New York.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I always had a strong idea of what I wanted to be but it always changed.
When I was really young I wanted to be a snowman, as I though that meant I’d be able to fly.

In reflection, how bad was your work in the first year?

Some of it was pretty ill-considered, but there’s still bits I look back at and get excited by. I think although technically I knew very little, I was pretty enthusiastic and I was creating some interesting ideas. My work has definitely developed far since then though; Studying in Minneapolis was a big turning point for me, it helped me to realise to just go for ideas I believed in, instead of wasting time worrying over them. I was inspired a lot by one of my teachers over there, Tom McElligott, he taught a class called ‘Concepts for advertising’. I guess all in all, my ideas have become more concise and my attention to detail has developed.

If you could show a piece of your folio to one person, what piece would you choose, and who would you show it to?

There’s lots of people I’d love to show my work to. I’ve always wanted to meet Steve Jobs but I wouldn’t know what to show him! I’ve wanted to do something for the publication ‘Kilimanjaro’ for a while now, so I think I’d show ‘If Drawings Were Photographs’ to Olu Michael Odukoya.

If you had your own business, who would you employ and why?

If I could employ anybody, I’d employ Tom McElligott; Tom Founded Fallon along with Nancy Rice and Pat Fallon. Creatively, he’s the wisest person I’ve ever met, he has a natural tendency to look at what something could be rather than what something is supposed to be. He believes in working with ideas past the point where others would be satisfied and he feels strongly towards creating work which is original, that pushes the boundaries and will get noticed. I think he’d be amazing to work with.

If you’ve got any left, what will you spend the last of your student loan on?

I don’t have any left, but if I did I would put it towards moving to New York.

Where will we find you in 12 months?

Hopefully in New York; I want to go out there and do different internships and see what excites me. I feel that this is the best time for me to go out there and try and make something happen. I’m still not sure if I want to go into advertising or not, as at one point I was adamant I was going to be a creative, but I’d love to do an internship at Mother NY and see what happens…

We’ve been extolling the virtues of graphic designer Sean Freeman since way back in 2008 when some of you were likely still in short trousers and I was at university saying pretentious things about poems I’d half-cribbed from York Notes. In all that time our love for his work hasn’t faded, and while seven years ago we were content to devote just 11 words to Sean, today we’ll dedicate a few more to him to bring you some great recent work.

“It’s a funny thing actually,” Tony Brook tells me, pointing to a series of three posters which have been reprinted especially for design studio Spin’s new exhibition, which opens today. “I was saying this morning to the guys who were putting the show up, when we first made those posters they all just went. 125, bang! Immediately! And we thought that was what would happen every time, because we’d never made anything before. We were disabused of that illusion fairly quickly.”

Spanish studio Clase bcn was tasked with creating the promotional material for The Palau de la Música Catalana’s 2015-2016 season and the result is a playful but refined identity. Encompassing the building’s grandeur, huge banners line the corridors of the concert hall, showcasing the events and people appearing at the Palau, tying them together with a border of lush colours to echo the hall’s eclectic programme. Made up of fragmented shapes the boarder has been translated wonderfully into the other areas of the identity, appearing in milky-coloured pamphlets and a sturdy book.

Annual reports aren’t the most exciting sounding of entities, but in the right hands, they can certainly become beautiful. Take Manchester agency Music’s designs for the British Fashion Council’s 2014/15 annual review. With an all-black cover, gorgeous imagery and bold typography, you’d do well to tell it apart from a slick coffee table tome. The book showcases the BFC’s “five strategic pillars”, according to Music; Business, Education, Innovation & Digital, Investment and Reputation, with imagery from events including London Fashion Week, the British Fashion Awards and London Collections Men.

It goes without saying that we receive more information from screens than we do from paper. But posters are such a superb platform for graphic design experimentation that they seem unlikely to become obsolete. Instead, they’re adapting, and a wonderful example of that shapeshifting is in the smart moving posters of agency Wonder Room. The man behind them is Steve Hockett, who made them in response to seeing his poster designs diluted for online platforms.

You know what we’re like, always going all gaga over pretty colours and GIFS like little typing magpies. But we’re not all about a pretty picture over here at It’s Nice That; and neither is designer Evan Grothjan. While we admit we were initially drawn in by his vivid tones and abstract compositions, it turns out there’s a lot more to his Spaces series than crowd-pleasing aesthetics. Instead, the images form an ongoing investigation into the relationship between space and emotion; something Evan’s been interested in since studying animation as part of his Rhode Island School of Design course.